There's been a vigorous discussion going on the past few days with staff and volunteers at the Computer History Museum regarding software preservation. I'm an advocate for the fierce collection of artifacts before they turn to dust; time is not on our side. As an example, there was news a few weeks ago of Microsoft bringing their Flight Simulator to end of life. IMHO, it would be a loss to future generations for that code to simply disappear. I wrote off to Ray Ozzie making an appeal for its preservation, but thus far radio silence. There are dozens upon dozens of similar stories every day (did you know neither IBM nor Fred can find the original source code to OS/360? We can find much later versions, but not the earliest ones).

There are a number of fascinating things to tackle as we collect: how does one present, how does one classify, how does on tell the story, how does one reveal the inner beauty of these objects that spring from human cognition and have no material manifestation other than their operation and some source lines of code?

From a paper in the most recent issue of Nature Biotechnology comes this paper on the Systems Biology Graphical Notation by researchers from places as far ranging as the European Bioinformatics Institute to CalTech and beyond. As the abstract notes, "Circuit diagrams and Unified Modeling Language diagrams are just two examples of standard visual languages that help accelerate work by promoting regularity, removing ambiguity and enabling software tool support for communication of complex information. Ironically, despite having one of the highest ratios of graphical to textual information, biology still lacks standard graphical notations. The recent deluge of biological knowledge makes addressing this deficit a pressing concern. Toward this goal, we present the Systems Biology Graphical Notation (SBGN), a visual language developed by a community of biochemists, modelers and computer scientists.

Quote of the day:

If it's green or wriggles, it's biology. If it stinks, it's chemistry. If it doesn't work, it's physics.

My theory is that this is due to three latent and systemic design flaws in the web, flaws that we could not have known a priori: changing assumptions about the nature of communication (from stateless post and get to streaming video), changing assumptions about the number of addressable devices (who could have imagined cars would be mobile IP nodes?), and a poor separation of concerns between presentation and semantics (which is partly attended to by the protocols of the semantic web). Speaking of those flaws, if you'd like to be sleep soundly tonight, then don't consider this DNS vulnerability or this much needed TCP/IP fix or these issues of identity theft.

But, if you want to have bragging rights for the absolutely coolest, sexiest data center on the web, you'll have to top this one.

Quote of the day:

Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet? I just the other day got...an Internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday. I got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the Internet commercially.Senator Ted Stevens